Musik Installationen Nuremberg is a transdisciplinary festival for music as performative spatial art. Music installations are musical-performative situations that form a landscape of opening and closing, constant and temporary spaces at various locations in the city. With a temporal turn from the teleology of historical-linear thinking and its associated dramaturgies, space and spatiality become central moments of musical experience – they become space-time-body-musics.
Music installations are neither work- nor concert-orientated, but performative and communicative. Hence, music and performance are social practices that reveal and question a variety of possible relationships between the participants, their surroundings and the public. With this specific combination of aesthetic, musical-performative and social practices, the festival creates a space of experience that exists in a similar temporality to sound art, but with musicians’ bodies in motion, in a similar devotion to the acoustic as a concert or an opera, but without their segmenting temporal politics and narrative setting. In an extremely polarised and segmented present, music installations focus on questions of form in art and empirical togetherness.
Through this unique blend of aesthetic, musical-performative, and social practices, the festival creates an experiential space - in similar temporality to sound art, but incorporating moving bodies and elements of sound. It shares the devotion to the acoustic as a concert or opera, yet without the segmented temporal politics and narrative framework they impose. In an intensely polarized and fragmented present time, music installations turn towards a collective empirical experience.
Stretching over two weekends, from 23 May to 1 June 2025, nine musical installations will take place at various locations and in collaboration with various institutions in Nuremberg. The program, which will vary on both weekends, has been coordinated in a way that festival guests can enjoy each installation at their leisure. We would like to invite the audience to engage with the works, each lasting over several hours, and to give them, so to speak, space and time; to move freely between the individual installations and, by doing so, to get to know not only the works themselves, but also their context within the city of Nuremberg. .
After the successful founding and first edition of the Musik Installationen Nuremberg festival in June 2022 by composer Laure M. Hiendl and curator and dramaturge Bastian Zimmermann, this edition introduces an expanded artistic team with curator Marie-Therese Bruglacher. Bruglacher works as a freelance curator at the interface of performance, music and space. From 2019-2022, she directed the “Disappearing Berlin”, which was hosted at Schinkel Pavillon as a satellite program, and created numerous temporary encounters with site-specific performance formats at various urban and socio-cultural locations throughBerlin. Music Installationen Nuremberg is organised by publisher and curator Bastian Zimmermann together with composer Laure M. Hiendl. Zimmermann publishes the magazine “Positionen - Texte zur aktuellen Musik” and takes over Wolke Verlag, which publishes books on music, together with Patrick Becker in 2025. He has worked for many years as a dramaturge for various music theatre and performance productions and has been curating the “Music for Hotel Bars” series since 2018. Laure M. Hiendl is a Vienna-based composer exploring digitality, acceleration, and demediatization and their aesthetic effects on contemporary art music. His works have been presented at numerous international festivals, and he collaborates with various renowned ensembles. Hiendl is a professor at the Mozarteum University Salzburg.
